6/09/1997 @ 12:00AM

End of your tether computing

So you just arrived in X-random City, the flight was a nightmare, you have a presentation to make in 15 minutes and you’re freaking out because you forgot the name of your biggest client’s new product line. You know it’s on their web site, but at the moment you’re trying to hail a cab in a drenching rainstorm and you forgot to bring your T1 line and 17-inch monitor. Bummer.

Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to hit the web anywhere, anytime? This is the promise of wireless connectivity to the Internet via new computing-cum-communications devices so small you can drop one into a pocket on your way out the door. Lots of claims are being made, but not surprisingly, some of the knottier issues are being conveniently swept under the rug.

Why WinCE makes you squint

Before the computer became a ubiquitous feature of the office landscape, we were chained to our desks by the telephone. That’s no longer true. The transition from cordless to cellular went quickly and now, for better or worse, there’s nowhere we can’t be reached. Who hasn’t taken care to avoid that BMW in the other lane whose driver is clearly more focused on what his broker just told him than on the surrounding traffic?

However, we still find ourselves married to the desktop. Our shotgun spouse is no longer the phone, but rather that winking cyclopean monitor–the last vacuum tube in the office. Sure there’s your laptop, so lightweight it hardly shows that one shoulder is lower than the other from lugging it through all those airports. But muling these things around hardly pays for their freight. Batteries rated to last six hours in reality last only two–unless you have really important work to do on the plane; then they fail instantly.

To the rescue comes a new generation of handheld computers small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, yet powerful enough to run real applications, not just a fancy Rolodex. But the screens–well, the screens just generally suck. Understandably. As the box gets smaller, so does the display. Portability is a terrific advantage, but not if you go stone-blind trying to read web pages the size of postage stamps.

Hey, I know, let’s make more standards

One notion being taken quite seriously by the likes of AT&T, Mitsubishi and Sun Microsystems is a retro little piece of tech called HDML, for Handheld Device Markup Language. The need for this extra “standard” is posited largely on the small screens provided with today’s handheld computers, cell phones and alphanumeric pagers. For a graphic demonstration of how this would work you can go to a page hacked up by Unwired Planet

, the creators of this wannabee web protocol. A few minutes looking at this clever demo should be enough to convince most readers that they’d rather pound nails into their heads than try to navigate the net through such a keyhole-size interface.

Since the bandwidth needed to send image data winging through the air is not quite here yet (more on that score shortly), HDML proposes to strip such information from web pages so they can be presented on tiny–and largely monochrome–handheld computer and cell phone screens. Brilliant! In effect, users end up with the equivalent of the nongraphical web browsers that preceded Mosaic and Netscape Navigator. Delivering E-mail and web pages to devices never intended to display such stuff seems a bold step indeed–a step into yesteryear.

The HDML proposal submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium states “Upon examination, it becomes clear that HTML cannot provide a suitable mechanism for accessing and navigating data on handheld devices.” And also: “…one would not want to try to view a typical web page on a handheld device.” Duh! Did anybody stop to think that maybe it was the device, not HTML, that needed modifying? This “solution” is likely to appeal to the same crowd who proposed, a few years back, turning fax machines into web browsers–or, a few years earlier, buggy whips into car radio antennas.

Honey, I shrunk the monitor!

So what’s the alternative? Instead of the Lilliputian direct-view monochrome screens on these devices, picture a pair of reading glasses. Special glasses to be sure, because they attach to your palmtop computer or cell phone and, when you put them on, you see a “virtual display” every bit as large, bright and colorful as that monitor on your desk. Call it the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too option: little pocket computer, big virtual display. And the power draw is nothing compared with an active matrix laptop screen. A couple of penlight batteries will keep you going from London to LA.

Personal displays like this are coming, and very soon. Companies working on various approaches to miniature displays include Displaytech, Hitachi, Kopin, Micron Display Technology, Motorola, Planar Systems, Seiko Epson, and Sony. (To dig deeper, check out the McLaughlin Consulting Group

.) The Holy Grail is a lightweight pair of “glasses” that fold up and fit into a breast pocket, yet present the viewer with the equivalent of a desktop monitor.

Past attempts to deliver such virtual displays have not exactly led to screaming success stories. This may have more to do with inappropriate application targets than with the prospects for the technology overall. Early prototypes came out of military research–and looked it, resembling high-tech football helmets that your average Suit wouldn’t be caught dead wearing around the office. Head-mounted viewers such as Nintendo’s Virtual Boy didn’t deliver sufficient resolution to be useful outside the gaming arena, and added more cost than most consumers were willing to pay. So-called virtual reality goggles, such as those from Virtual I/O and Kopin’s Forte Technologies, were aimed at a market that couldn’t cough up enough bucks to keep products afloat. While there’s plenty of creative ferment and experimentation in the VR scene, there isn’t a boatload of money being spent.

Klaatu barada nikto!

The real problem gating widespread adoption of wearable displays isn’t any mystery. Most people feel that a screen-view option this offbeat has to, at a minimum, present a full view of their computer workspace without killing tradeoffs in clarity, resolution and color depth–and had better not make them look like the robot Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still. Most of today’s miniature display products don’t even come close to meeting these expectations.

The outfit that can first deliver a full-color, full-screen VGA display will utterly preclude the need for crippling web data using HDML. Even if wireless bandwidth constraints mean we have to forgo graphics for a while, we still get a whole screen, which means no horizontal panning to read the kind of web pages we’re already used to seeing on the desktop. Also, we get colored fonts, critical for differentiating textual elements and quickly locating hyperlinks. When the bandwidth arrives, we can simply turn the graphics option back on, as with any of the major web browsers available today.

Forget games. Forget immersive VR. The killer apps (you should excuse the expression) will be in mainstream business applications. Aside from their obvious utility to road warriors, wearable displays are likely to revolutionize business practice across the boards. Envision a dozen people sitting around a conference table, perhaps only seconds away from their offices. How many times is information needed to make quick decisions, but the data is on a computer in one of those offices down the hall? Typically, these needed datapoints are noted and the scheduling dance begins to pick a date to reconvene once it’s been gathered.

Now instead, think what happens when all these people have instant access to their personal files, the web, the corporate intranet. When information is needed, someone calls it up on the spot through a handheld computer attached to an eyeglass-style personal display. This gives “bifocal” a whole new meaning–and it will supercharge the decision making process in organizations of every stripe.

But what about the tether? Is there a wire from these glasses to the computer? Probably. But it won’t be any more inconvenient than the wire on a pair of Walkman headphones. More important, are these wearable devices online? There isn’t one simple answer to the question.

ID4 as ISP

Wireless is clearly on the way, and some of the delivery scenarios are pretty wild. Sky Station

will use something akin to huge blimps (50 meters in diameter and 140 meters long) to deliver Internet service over major cities (see Forbes, May 5). Teledesic

proposes to launch several hundred low-orbit satellites to deliver net access to every square inch of the planet. Before you scoff, consider that the latter effort is being bankrolled by Bill Gates and Craig McCaw, hardly your average clueless VCs.

Being in live contact with your intranet from any physical location in the company would be an obvious win, and there’s a lot of money riding on making that possible. The win is much larger if you can access the public Internet from where you live or anyplace you might be visiting. It’s coming, but it isn’t here yet.

That doesn’t mean the advantages of handheld computers equipped with virtual displays are on hold until you can access the net via satellite. Many software packages are available today that can download whole web sites for later offline playback. Got a big meeting coming up? Just grab the pages you think you’ll need and bring them with you. Little junket to Beijing? Just scoop all those bookmarked articles you’ve been meaning to read and take them along. With a fast corporate Internet connection and the right software, such harvesting is quick and painless.

Web browsers, pocket computers, this odd new brand of virtual eyewear–and, someday perhaps not too far off, globe-spanning wireless net access–may well be consigning our enslavement to the desktop to its rightful place: in history.

Christopher Locke (clocke@panix.com) is vice president of business development at Displaytech in Longmont, Colo. He built and maintains the company’s web site at http://www.displaytech.com